Political Science

This course examines the background, context, conduct and implications of politics relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (TSI) communities and policy affecting Indigenous Australians. It explores aspects of inclusion and exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from the formal political system, internal power relations within and between communities, social movements and representative bodies, Australian Indigenous politics with those of other nations, and looks at a range of policy areas.

The course provides students with a theoretically-grounded understanding of the role of the European Union as an international actor. Using theories of international relations, European integration and Foreign Policy Analysis, it analyzse and evaluate the EU’s evolving external identity and policy capabilities across a range of external relations, including membership conditionality, trade and development, international crime and terrorism, asylum and immigration, foreign, security and defense policy, and democracy and human rights promotion. The course then examines the nature of key bilateral relationships between the EU and selected countries (US, Russia, and China) and regions (former colonies, regional groups), explaining the extent to which they have been institutionalized and the challenges that define them. It will end by assessing what sort of international actor the EU ‘is’ and ‘wants to be’ – namely civilian, normative or military – and evaluating the likelihood of the EU emerging as a global superpower in the future.

This course offers an exploration of the histories, theories and practices of democracy. It provides students with a systematic overview of the complex discourses on democracy today. What is democracy? Where does the idea of democracy come from? Has the idea one or many origins? Can democracy be justified, and if so, on what grounds? What are the limits of democracy? These, and many more, questions lie at the heart of democratic theory and of this course.

This course examines some fundamental questions about the nature of war and conflicts in international politics. It covers the following topics: whether war is part of human nature or a social invention; if democracies are less prone to fight than authoritarian regimes; whether war is an unavoidable consequence of anarchy, and if so, the role of human agency; what factors contribute to conflict among nations and how these factors have changed over time; if the nuclear shadow is back in our contemporary international security; has the window of humanitarian operations been closed; and whether we can speak of “new wars” in the 21st century. The course uses an interdisciplinary perspective, incorporating insights from political science, anthropology, psychology, and history to better understand our current international environment.